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by mad2Bhere



Category: Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Genre: Angst, F/M, M/M, Married Couple, Romance, Same-Sex Marriage
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-13
Updated: 2013-04-13
Packaged: 2017-12-08 09:01:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,095
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/759559
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mad2Bhere/pseuds/mad2Bhere
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Dragonborn (Serano) comes to Skyrim to look for his family. Eventually he finds it selling cheap mead in Riften’s tavern, but that story will be told another time.</p>
            </blockquote>





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**Author's Note:**

> Written for a Kinkmeme prompt.

One day, the letters just stopped coming. 

That didn’t necessarily have to mean anything, though: They used to come sporadically, anyway; sometimes weeks or whole months could elapse between one letter and the next. They probably didn’t allow him to write home as often as he would like, afraid that he might spill some secrets that could fall into the wrong hands or something like that. 

He didn’t think much of it. 

Mother, on the other hand, got frantic. Her little baby, so far away from home, in a country full of retched, filthy humans; and when she went to his superiors they claimed that they couldn’t tell her anything about her son’s current situation, since it could endanger his mission and his life. It was useless to insist that her son might be missing; they wouldn’t share any of their information with normal civilians. They still had to face too much opposition, even from altmer, so their caution actually made sense. The only thing she did get out of them was that her son was stationed somewhere in Skyrim. Letters took a while until they got delivered here…

Still, Mother claimed that she knew something was wrong; felt it the way only a mother could sense the wellbeing of her child.

She ignored his snort.

“We need to find him ourselves. Someone has to go look for him.”, she declared with passion. 

Her green eyes shone with determination, and her intricate earrings clinked when she whirled her head around to stare at him, urging him to approve of her solution. He stared straight past her gaze, focusing his attention on the tip of her right ear instead, where her golden skin was not as flawless as the make-up on her face tried to make people believe. He still had trouble looking into this woman’s eyes. 

“And how should we go about that? The fact that he might be ‘somewhere in Skyrim’ isn’t much of a lead”, he felt obliged to point out. “Besides, there is a Civil War going on there right now, in case you haven’t heard. Finding one person in this mess might be impossible.”

“Are you saying we should just give up? He is your brother!” The last sentence was a high-pitched scream full of indignation that made his ears ring.

Of course Sanyon was his brother. It wasn’t like he could forget about that fact. Not when it was always “Look how smart your brother is!”, “look how well your brother can control his spells!”, “look at your brother’s beautiful fiancée!”, “look at your brother’s wonderful new uniform! The Thalmor accepted him, aren’t you happy for him?” 

Not one word about his own achievements, ever. He had gotten the message.

He had never gotten along with his little brother particularly well. Their relationship had always been a fight for their parents’ admiration, one which his brother had always won effortlessly. He didn’t even have to try; but he did anyway.

Even the move of joining the Thalmor had been made just to spite him. Poor little Sanyon, who always liked burying his nose in books more than going out to see the world, and who had no secret ambition to go and hunt down heretics in the outer provinces of the Imperium. 

But his older brother had wanted to do just that, and had been rejected in the most humiliating form possibly, so it came to Sanyon as natural as breathing to try and succeed at what his brother had failed to do. He had even managed to get the post in Skyrim he had been eyeing himself. 

And now Sanyon was missing.

Maybe. 

“And who do you think should go to look for him?!”, he countered. “The Thalmor already said that they won’t help us. Are you planning to go on your own? I can’t see how that plan could possibly fail!” 

“I will not leave my son to die somewhere in that barbarian province!”

She had argued with Sanyon when he had expressed the wish to join the Thalmor; this exact same situation they found themselves in had been Mother’s biggest fear from the start. She had actually started shouting at her little baby, just the way she was shouting at him right now.

“Interesting, that you didn’t see fit to complain when I tried to head to the very same place!”

She really hadn’t argued with him when he tried to join. He wasn’t sure whether it was because she trusted his skills to defend himself (which was highly unlikely; Sanyon was by far the better mage of the two, it wouldn’t make sense) or… 

“Oh come on, it was obvious they wouldn’t allow you to join anyway!”

…because she knew they would reject him. Everyone seemed to have known that simple fact beforehand, only he himself had chosen to be too blind to see the obvious. 

Before he could come up with a suitable response to that, Mother spoke again.

“You need to go and save him.”

“Me?!” 

It probably was the logical conclusion. Mother and his little sister shouldn’t travel on their own, them being women without any fighting experience. Besides, they were both needed here, as well as Mother’s husband. It only left him as the natural choice.

That didn’t mean he was going to be happy about it. 

“I don’t even think there is any cause for alarm! Besides, you think you have lost one son and the solution you come up with is sending your other son straight into that very same ‘barbarian country’?!”

“It is your responsibility. When my husband dies, Sanyon will become the next head of the family. It is your duty to protect him.”

Somehow that sentence had changed the very air around them. Up until this point he had thought he was arguing with her as an equal, as her other son, as her oldest child, as a member of the family. But then she had to go and remind him that the role of mother was exactly that: A role, an act, one she could assume and drop whenever it suited her. Obviously the play was over now, and he had to remember his own role that had been beaten into him from the moment of his little brother’s birth.

But he was in no mood for that now. He had wanted to go to Skyrim before, yes, but on his own terms. He had wanted to go as a Thalmor Justiciar, as one who could make the locals cower in awe whenever they heard his title, as a person worthy of respect. Not as his brother’s keeper, a mere servant scrambling through the dirt looking for the trail of his brother’s boots. 

Not on his own, not without any official document in his pocket that ensured the locals would supply him with food and shelter and any assistance they could offer. If he agreed to Mother’s terms he would travel through a country that prided itself in having brought the elves close to extinction once, alone, as a vagabond, without any means to earn money. He might be able to work as a mercenary, but that was risky; there was a chance he wouldn’t even live long enough to find his brother.

“And I can’t become the next head?”

Of course, the question was redundant. But he had always had trouble of backing down when he felt himself being driven into a corner.

When his brother left he had thought things could become different. Well, he was mistaken. 

“You can’t become family head. No one would accept you. The other families would laugh at us. They probably wouldn’t even allow us to keep the mansion.”

Naturally, he knew all that, too. The fact that he was her oldest son didn’t mean anything in his particular case.

“And why would that be?”, he drawled. Of course, they both knew the answer, and if the life of his brother really was in danger they were wasting their time with this meaningless quarrel. He simply asked because he had to hear it from Mother’s mouth, in her own words. As if she had never told him before.

She knew the reason, because every time she looked at him she got a reminder. Every day she was confronted with his unusual talent for fire magic, with his eyes that only looked yellow if the light in the room was just right; otherwise everyone could spot the red taint in them. His height was also a giveaway; other altmer, even female ones, were always slightly taller than him. He had the basic appearance of an altmer, but only if one chose not to look too closely. 

“Because you are impure.”

He was a half breed, and every pure-blooded altmer (like the Thalmor, like Mother, like his siblings) hated him for it.  
Sanyon, his half-brother, was the only one Mother would acknowledge as her son. 

He wanted to comment on that, throw it back into her face, but the woman wasn’t finished yet.

“Besides, all of this is your fault! He never would have joined the Thalmor if you hadn’t tried to do so first! And now you’re just jealous because they rejected you!”

It was true. It was all true. However, that didn’t give her the right to talk to him like that. Not when she was the very reason the Thalmor hadn’t accepted him, the very cause of his impure blood line. 

“Funny you should mention that”, he drawled. “They probably would have accepted me if my bitch of a mother hadn’t decided to get knocked up by some random dark elf!”

It was silent after that. 

The woman simply stared at him until he realized that he had gone too far and felt the need to look away.

“Get out”, Mother said slowly. “GET OUT!”

He was dumbstruck for a few seconds, both by his own words and her violent reaction, but eventually he regained his composure. 

Part of it.

“Fine! Fine!”, he shouted. ”I will go on your little suicide mission! Let’s see if you change your attitude after you lose both of your sons!”

 

He fled the scene immediately afterwards. He ran upwards to his room, just like he had done ever since he was small and didn’t know how to settle a dispute with Mother; but this time he didn’t cry in a corner or incinerate his sister’s dolls in rage. This time he went to pack all things he might need on a journey which could very well last a few months. It would take him at least a week to simply get to Skyrim. 

He sensed his sister enter the room before he saw her. 

“You heard everything, right? Talk to Liav for me if Mother won’t do it, will you?”, he called over his shoulder. Liav, his fiancée. 

“Convince her family to wait for my return.”

“You don’t have to leave. I can talk to Mother.”

He didn’t answer; he wasn’t sure how he should reply to that. Right now he wanted to leave. He needed to get out of this house, away from these people.

When he didn’t say anything, the girl spoke up again. “Just promise me you will be careful. I don’t want to lose both of my brothers.”

He had no idea how to behave whenever the girl started talking like that. It was creepy. 

“I’ll try.”

\-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Sometimes he felt like he was lucky. The man who had impregnated his mother had at least been another mer, even if it hadn’t been an altmer or bosmer. Dunmer were considered the lowest of the elvhen races; while it was a shame for an altmer woman to get knocked up by one, it was accepted and tolerated if an altmer male wanted to find out whether dunmer women really were as open-minded about sex as the rumors about them suggested.

He was a disgrace to the people who raised him, but he knew it could be worse. He knew what happened to children with human fathers. More often than not the women didn’t keep the babies. 

He was lucky to be alive, that his family had decided to keep him. 

The very thought made him sick.

\-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

He spent half of the money his sister had gotten from Mother that very same night before even leaving the city. There was a dunmer tavern wench that had been making eyes at him a few weeks ago; he was determined to get her into his bed tonight. 

His desire for dunmer had something dark, twisted about it. Ever since he found out why everyone was treating him so differently even though he came from a supposedly distinguished and pure-blooded family, he had somehow gotten it in his head that this whole dark-skinned race had personally insulted him. They had screwed over the life he was supposed to lead by letting one of them screw his mother; and he was getting back at them for that by going to the tavern at weekends, taking one of them with him to the best room his meager allowance permitted and fucking them hard against the wall. He liked calling them his slut or bitch while thrusting into them as hard as he could, and was childishly delighted whenever he found one who actually got off on that. 

He enjoyed breaking them, humiliating them, teasing them until he had them begging for his cock, until they whimpered and mewled and panted for it. It gave him a sick feeling of power, of being in control that he couldn’t find any other way.  
He hated their dark skin, their stupid, pointed ears that looked entirely different from altmer ones, their ridiculous names he made a point of mishearing; he hated that altmer considered him one of them while dunmer considered him an altmer, and he hated that he couldn’t figure out where that left him.

But he hated their red eyes more than anything.

Tonight he was torn between his desire for making this sweet little dunmer woman scream his name while he bent her over a table and drinking himself into a stupor. Trying to do both at the same time never worked out for him, and this time was no exception.

By the time they stumbled into the room he had paid for he was so hideously drunk that he couldn’t even get it up for her. He just slobbered over her face in something he hoped could still be interpreted as a kiss and fondled her breasts awkwardly, giggling stupidly the whole time, until he passed out. The next morning he sneaked out of town nursing the worst hangover he ever experienced.

\-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Of course, he didn’t get far. The money he had didn’t last long after that, and when he finally reached the border the only food he’d eaten in the past two days was whatever plants and nuts he had found in the woods. No one had ever taught him how to hunt; since he didn’t have a bow he tried to use his fire magic to for it, but his first bite of incinerated rabbit had him looking for nuts and fruits again.

The borders to Skyrim were closed, they told him, but Mother had made it fairly clear that he was not supposed to let anything stop him. So he cut through the woods and mountains, crossing the border without being detected – just to rush straight into a skirmish between humans in blue-grey clothing and other humans in red-brown clothing. With the hunger clouding his judgment he was not entirely certain which side he should be supporting; they obviously didn’t know either, because soldiers of both armies tried to take him out. He fought for his life, but his movements were sluggish and mostly useless. Eventually someone knocked him over the head and he went out like a light.

When he woke up they had taken his weapons and his elvhen armor and carted him towards a small village called Helgen for his execution. He vaguely wondered if this was what had happened to his brother as well.

It felt like an insult when the soldier who took his name before taking him to the axe had to comment: “Are you one of the Thalmor agents? No, no that cannot be.” 

His eyes gave him away every time.

What had come afterwards definitely hadn’t happened to his brother: An ancient dragon sweeping down to massacre everyone in sight, the leaders of two great armies despairing at the sight of the flames and carnage, and at last the escape through the tunnels of the old fortress. It was all very classy.

It took him two months and three dead dragons until he found his brother’s corpse ironically close to where he had started his journey through Skyrim. Somewhere near Riverwood he found a dilapidated altar of Talos, his brother’s cold body at its feet. He found a letter from Elenwen herself in his pocket: Obviously Sanyon had found a cult of Talos, but had been sent to investigate it by himself when his superiors refused to believe his repeated accusations. So he had gone alone, fought the believers and got himself killed by one of them. End of story. Other corpses, most likely believers, were scattered about. The cold had conserved the bodies well; but whatever trails of survivors he might have been able to follow were long since washed away by the rain.

When he stared at his brother’s corpse he was overcome with a terrible feeling of loss and despair. Not because Sanyon was dead: He had accepted and dealt with that fact months ago, so actually seeing the body didn’t have any impact on him. But Mother’s came back up to haunt him, her last command whispered into his ear when he passed by her on his way to the front door: “Don’t you dare come back here without your brother.” 

He couldn’t go back like this. He couldn’t return. With the way their farewell had gone he wasn’t sure he would be welcomed back without his brother in tow. So he decided to try and find something else: Maybe he could at least bring his murderer to justice and redeem himself that way. It looked like one of the believers had killed him, but most of them had been unarmed and harmless by the look of it; Sanyon wouldn’t have had a problem dealing with unarmed civilians. There might have been a seasoned fighter among them that had survived the skirmish; or maybe Sanyon had been killed after dealing with the believers by some random bandits; that would explain why he didn’t carry his father’s ring and Mother’s amulet they had given to him when he had left. Those were the only possibilities.

He spent months cleaning out every bandit hideout he came across, each time capturing and torturing the leader to find out whether he knew anything about a dead altmer near an altar of Talos or the missing jewelry.  
He never found anything. 

His enthusiasm waned and faded in the months that followed, but he never gave up completely. If he did, he would have to return to his parents and try to fit into his old life again. Pleading to be allowed back into mediocrity, back to scrambling for every acknowledgement of his skills the other altmer would be willing to grant him, while most people here treated him like a hero, albeit somewhat reluctantly. But they were still his parents and he couldn’t imagine a life without them.

In another life, in which he had a different father and would have been able to join the Thalmor, all the people who thought of him as a hero now would curse his existence. Imagine it, the hero of old Nord tales, the Dragonborn, whose alliance lay with the Thalmor and who used his powers to strengthen the Dominion. 

In this life, the Thalmor hated him. He was worried about his parents’ lives. He knew now that the Thalmor didn’t have any qualms about attacking the families of their targets, and his was relatively well known. He had tried to contact his parents and the family of his fiancée, in secret of course, just in case the Thalmor hadn’t found out about them yet. When he asked Delphine for help she advised him to cut all ties with his family altogether, insisted that this would be safest for him and for them; but he couldn’t do that, not when they didn’t even know the danger they were in. He wrote many roundabout letters, mentioning in half-words and metaphors that he had somehow managed to piss a very powerful and influential group off; that the threat was real and the best move would be to get as far away from the city they lived in as possible. However, he didn’t dare to sign the letters with his name or even with “Your Son”, in case they got into the wrong hands. So he had to live with the constant fear that his parents simply ignored the anonymous warnings.

Naturally, he never got an answer to a single one of his letters.

He was wasting his time here; let Alduin come, let him swallow this cold, uncivilized part of the world; he needed to go and face the people who used to be his whole world. 

Used to be.

\-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

After an arduous week of cleaning out the last bandit hideouts in the mountains near Whiterun and still finding no clue about the identity of his brother’s murderer, he decided it was time to go back home.

He couldn’t say when exactly he had begun thinking of the small, dingy cottage he had bought in Whiterun as home. Sometime after his marriage, that much was certain. Whenever he decided to return to Whiterun he got a spring in his step, his satchel instantly felt lighter and sometimes, when he was absolutely certain nothing was around to hear him, he even whistled a tune.

Merely thinking about going back there did that to him; and it wasn’t just the prospect of finally cleaning the grime from his body, getting a hot meal, and being able to bury his cock in his spouse’s hot, tight flesh. It was more about the warm smile that greeted him when he came through the door and the blind love he saw in his spouse’s eyes; the pointless, meaningless chatter, and the warm body that tried to snuggle up to him every night.

It was dangerous to dwell on that, though. His little adventure and this fantasy life would end eventually; then he would have to head back to his family and random fucks in a tavern. There was no place for his spouse there. And he couldn’t very well stay here, could he?

Maybe he could. 

But he wasn’t ready to make that decision just yet.

“I’m back”, he called up the stairs, just to notice movement from the periphery of his vision, and spotted his spouse sitting in the chair next to the front door. His spouse was leafing through one of the books he had brought with him from his last trip (the biography of Barenziah, he noted; he would have to find the other parts), but looked up at him immediately. 

If the Thalmor ever came here, if they found this place and managed to take this person away, he knew he wouldn’t survive it.  
One day he would have to decide what to do with the rest of his life, but for now he was going to enjoy what he had.

Dark skin which color reminded him of cold ash, even though it was always so warm to his touch. 

Long, delicate fingers (with a golden wedding ring on one of them, a ring with his name engraved on it) that clung desperately to him when they fucked, like they were afraid he would simply disappear if they let go.

A gentle smile that never failed to take his breath away. 

Red eyes he didn’t hate.

No; red eyes he loved. 

He hadn’t thought he would ever find himself in such a ridiculous situation, but here he was and loved this dunmer and couldn’t for the life of him figure out how to deal with that. It scared the shit out of him, there was no way this could ever work out, but he was certain something inside him would die if he ever left this man behind.

“Welcome home, Serano.”


End file.
